‘What Constitutes a Reader?’ Don Juan and the Changing Reception of Romantic Form

Abstract

‘Byron’s poetry is the most striking example I know in literary history of the creative role which poetic form can play’, Auden wrote in ‘The Shield of Perseus’.¹ The question of what role, exactly, Byron’s ironically hailed ‘gentle reader’ plays in the reception of poetic form has been approached in a number of ways since the Romantic period. There have been studies of the economics and politics of reception and close analysis of various scenes of reception such as Lucy Newlyn’s examination of Romantic poets’ responses to hearing each other’s work.² On a different front, profiles of the wider reading public have been constructed through analyses of guides and educational books to see how the ideal reader was envisaged while other scholars have traced the aesthetic horizons of the different groups that make up a readership, for example, women, children and working-class readers. Since Jon P. Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (1987), and Lee Erickson’s The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (2000), particular attention has been paid to the shaping of readerly taste through the direction of the reviewers and editors. In diverse studies of the Romantic period, marginalia, literary table talk and memoirs have been scrutinised for what they can tell us of reactions to poems in the run up to, and immediate aftermath of, publication.